Trump has the biggest arsenal at his disposal. And he isn’t afraid to use it.
Now Donald Trump threatened another Middle East nation and it’s turning heads.
Trump Said What Nobody Else Would. It Worked.
The Strait of Hormuz will not be tolled. Not by Iran. Not by Oman. Not by anyone. And it took a presidential threat to blow up an American ally to make that unambiguously clear.
The episode began with Iranian state media reporting that Iran and Oman were in discussions to jointly manage shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — effectively establishing a toll regime on the most critical energy chokepoint in the world, through which roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption flows daily. The plan would have handed Tehran a revenue stream from the very waterway the United States military has been blockading in order to choke off the Iranian regime’s finances.
Trump’s response was vintage Trump: undiplomatic, unambiguous, and immediately effective. Asked at a Cabinet meeting whether the United States would accept a deal that involved Iran and Oman jointly controlling the strait, the president did not equivocate.
“No, the strait’s got to be opened to everybody, it’s international waters. Nobody’s going to control it. We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it. That’s part of the negotiation,” Trump said. “Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow ’em up. They understand that, they’ll be fine.”
Bessent Followed With The Financial Muscle — And The Omani Ambassador Responded
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent translated that threat into the language of sanctions the following morning.
“The United States Government will not tolerate any effort to impose a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz,” Bessent wrote in a post on X. “Oman, in particular, should know that the U.S. Treasury will aggressively target any actors involved — directly or indirectly — in facilitating tolls for the Strait and any willing partners will be penalized.”
He went further, announcing that Treasury had placed sanctions on Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority — the Iranian government agency that had been formed to manage the waterway and, according to U.S. officials, extort ships passing through it. “Through Economic Fury, the United States has imposed a financial stranglehold on the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism,” Bessent said. “Treasury has deprived the Iranian regime of revenue for their weapons programs, terrorist proxies and nuclear ambitions.”
The outcome was precisely what Trump predicted. At the White House press briefing Thursday, Bessent told reporters he had spoken directly with the Omani ambassador, who “assured” him there are no plans to toll the critical waterway. Bessent said Trump had “wanted to punctuate freedom of navigation in the strait” — a diplomatic translation of what the president had delivered rather more colorfully in the Cabinet room.
The Principle Behind The Bluntness
Critics of Trump’s “blow ’em up” language will note that Oman is a close American ally with decades of military and economic ties to the United States. It is home to key air and naval access arrangements that underpin American power projection in the Persian Gulf. Threatening to destroy it is not conventional diplomatic practice.
What the episode illustrates, however, is a foreign policy principle that conventional diplomacy has repeatedly failed to enforce: that the Strait of Hormuz is international waters, and that no nation — not Iran, not Oman, not a joint Oman-Iran tollbooth scheme — will be permitted to control it. Previous American administrations said versions of this. Trump put a financial and military price tag on violating it, stated it publicly in front of cameras, and the conversation ended. The Omani ambassador called Bessent. The assurances were given.
The broader diplomatic community appears to be taking note. A spokesperson for the UN’s International Maritime Organization confirmed that “there is no international agreement where tolls can be introduced for transiting international straits,” calling any such toll a “dangerous precedent.” Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the reported Iranian plan “completely unacceptable.” The language was more measured than Trump’s. The effect was the same.
